ILLUMINA TO LAUNCH GENOMICS APPS STORE

Having trouble sifting through all that DNA data gathered in a gene-sequencing test? There’s an app for that.

San Diego’s Illumina is setting up a software marketplace around its BaseSpace gene-sequencing service.

Called BaseSpace Apps, the marketplace is a genomics version of Apple’s Apps Store, and it aims to break a bottleneck around software for analyzing genetic information.

“The diversity of applications that our customers require is far beyond what any one (company) could provide, and the technology is evolving at a rate that our customers are looking for new solutions at a really fast clip,” Jordan Stockton, associate product planning director for Illumina, said this week.

BaseSpace Apps isn’t like a smartphone apps store — which sells tiny pieces of software designed to work on smartphones and tablets. The software in Illumina’s apps store would be full-fledged genomics informatics, with complex algorithms for analyzing the huge amounts of data generated in gene mapping.

Illumina makes gene-mapping machines used in research labs. As costs come down, Illumina believes gene mapping will move beyond labs and into mainstream medicine as a diagnostic tool for doctors and hospitals. And software to analyze genetic data will be a key part of the shift.

“There is a need for software to streamline and simplify the reporting and analysis,” said Stockton. “So providing a one-stop shop where customers can try out different applications and see if they fit their needs it critical to enabling genomics to enter different markets.”

Illumina’s BaseSpace service today hosts the results of gene-mapping tests. The data are encrypted and housed in the Internet cloud. Illumina provides some analytics software, such as comparing how a specific gene sequence differs from a reference sequence.

But Illumina is hoping that BaseSpace Apps will encourage developers to write additional applications.

To that end, Illumina is providing the API — a basic tool kit for writing software in the BaseSpace platform — to developers.